


gas pressure of the sun

by misandrywitch



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Catholicism, Crushes, Post-The Dream Thieves, Pre-Blue Lily Lily Blue, Ronan should keep a dream diary or something woah buddy, The Heat Death of the Universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-27
Updated: 2016-05-27
Packaged: 2018-06-10 16:48:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6965074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misandrywitch/pseuds/misandrywitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Parrish and Lynch—two sets of shoulders for Gansey to knock against, two bodies fighting for the spot in his passenger seat.</p><p>Adam and Ronan— that’s another combination. Ronan doesn’t know what it means.</p>
            </blockquote>





	gas pressure of the sun

**Author's Note:**

> things i thought about while writing this: how ronan thinks about the world. how adam thinks about the world. how ronan thinks about how adam thinks about the world. how gansey worries about ronan and adam. how fucked up they both are after 'tdt.' how gansey should be a king arthur story. ask me about how gansey's story should be a king arthur story.

 

As the summer peaks, Ronan dreams about bees.

Honeybees, specifically, the kind that fill the fields outside the Barns in the summer with their hurried droning, occupied, shooting away from wildflowers in clouds when you run through them. He dreams of the warm sunshine that goes with them, the peak of summer, long days where the humidity sticks to the back of your neck and ice melts in the glass as soon as you fill it. And the paths their lives take—filled with action, with building, harmless unless threatened, yellow pollen in clumps and the fruits of their labor—and how the honeycomb tastes, a marvel of engineering and sticky-sweet victory.

Perfect hexagons, slotted together where they should be, how they should be, holding each other together, all yellow-gold and clever designs. Sucking honey from your fingers.

It’s an improvement, really, on the shit that he can dream about. Still does, of course. But he doesn’t mind it until they start to turn into wasps.

There’s a buzzing in his room and Ronan doesn’t hear it, but he does hear Chainsaw’s squawk, which propels him into waking faster than almost anything else can. Something buzzes in his ear—an insect. It’s a sound that, to everyone caught up in Richard Gansey’s life, means _panic._ He’s tangled up in the bedsheet and his headphones and yesterday’s clothes and it’s a moment before he can throw all of them across the room to spot the wasp, which is buzzing around his face. If it stings him, it’ll just hurt like hell. But that isn’t what it wants, because it’s not just a wasp, it’s a wasp he dreamed, which means it wants one thing and one thing only. Ronan’s open bedroom door. His heart rackets up to eleven.

He seizes the first nearby object that can be repurposed as a wasp catcher, which happens to be a glass sitting on the windowsill filled with orange juice of questionable age. Liquid sloshes across the window and onto the carpet as Ronan upends it, slams the glass down over the wasps buzzing, furious body.

Ronan stares at it, triumphant and shaken. The wasp collides with the sides of the glass and the faint light from the street outside glances off its stinger, long and black and sharp. There is nothing warm or sunshine-gold about this insect, nothing organized, nothing impressive. Just malevolent.

“Fucker,” he says, with as much bitterness as he can muster (a great deal). An icy finger of worry starts tracing itself down the length of his spine. What if it had been more than one wasp? A whole swarm? He sees it in his head, six legs crawling up the length of Gansey’s arm as he sleeps, hunches over his model Henrietta, talks on the phone. And he sees Matthew in the back of the car, and fire in the night sky, when the wasp sinks the stinger into Gansey’s neck.

“Fuck you,” Ronan says again, because he can, and then he feeds the insect to Chainsaw.

 

* * *

 

“You know,” Adam says from under the car, “and I know this is maybe a foreign concept to you, but generally you are expected to do your job at your job.”

Ronan makes a noncommittal noise. He’s perched on the hood of some fucker’s recently repaired sedan, boot laces dangling, bird on his shoulder. It’s three in the afternoon—a Thursday—and the rapidly descending September deadline is hurtling towards them faster and faster every day despite the fact that it’s still humid and somewhere close to ninety degrees. The auto shop should be the worst place to spend a hot Thursday afternoon, but it’s oddly comforting. It smells like engine oil, and the radio is crackling in the background.

And, of course, there are Adam’s legs, in grease-stained coveralls, halfway underneath the hood of somebody’s pickup truck.

It’s a lot better than sitting around the house with Noah, or loitering around with Gansey as he moons after either Blue or Glendower—the jury’s out on that one for how this day will go. Not that those things are bad, really, but they don’t compare to the half an inch of skin between where Adam Parrish’s pant legs stop and his socks begin.

“I know it’s complicated,” Adam says, voice filled with a strange combination of irritation and amusement, “but most of the world works for a living—ah c’mon you—there—“ he cuts himself off in his effort to screw something in place underneath the car, his voice catching.

“I’m a nonconformist,” Ronan says. “Workers should control the means of production.” He bounces his boot heel on the sedan’s bumper.

Adam’s knees bend and he slides out from under the truck on his back, his coveralls looped over his shoulders to protect an equally ratty once-white t-shirt. His hands are grimy to the elbow, and his hair is a mop of humidity curls. “That’s only applicable to those of us who can’t dream cars into existence,” he says. “You’re your own means of production. The factory line is obsolete.” He hauls himself to his feet and wipes his hands on a rag, pushes his hair out of his face with a wrist. He leaves a smudge behind.

Ronan’s fingers itch.

“Anyway,” Adam continues, like he hasn’t noticed Ronan’s itching fingers at all, “just consider yourself lucky Boyd isn’t around to chase you off. He thinks you’re a punk.” Ronan preens a little at this, because a punk is exactly what he hopes men like Boyd would think of him. “And he doesn’t like people who drive German cars.”

“It’s not a German car.”

“It’s a Beamer.” Adam turns to pop the hood on the sedan which does interesting things to the line of his shoulders.

“Yeah, but it’s not from Germany,” Ronan snaps. He doesn’t mean to snap. It’s just how it comes out. “Pretty sure they don’t make cars that never need gasoline or an oil change.”

“But they do, though,” Adam says, turning back around. He leans against the car and looks at Ronan, eyebrows furrowing. His eyes are blue. “Cars need those things to run.”

“And your point is?”

“I want to understand how you do it,” Adam says swiftly. “There have to be rules, right? Things you can and can’t do. Limitations, guidelines. There are for—“ he touches his own chest, right above his heart. Leaves a smear of grease behind. Ronan stares at it.

“It’s magic, Parrish,” he says, and Adam just sighs, which makes Ronan feel faintly disappointed. He doesn’t have a real answer to that, because there are limitations, sure, but it isn’t like they are written down somewhere. He can just feel them. He’s limited only by what he can dream of, and the amount of energy needed to make it real.

“I want to understand how it works,” Adam says again, and Ronan doesn’t want to tell him he’s not sure if he can.

“Who cares?” he says. “It’s fucking cool, right?”

Adam just shakes his head, turns back to the car. Ronan studies the back of his neck because nobody will see him looking.

“Shithead,” he says. “How late do you work?”

“Seven.”

“What’re you doing after?”

“Sleeping,” Adam says. “I don’t know. Blue has to work. What’s Gansey doing today?”

“Fuck if I know. You don’t have a date with your crazy girlfriend?” He means Persephone, but it strikes him that Adam might think he means Blue, which bothers him for some reason.

“No. And she’s not crazy,” Adam says, and it’s clear he does know who Ronan means. “I couldn’t have done what I did on the Fourth of July without her help. I couldn’t have fixed the line.”

“Do you want me to show you how I do it?” Ronan says, with as much bravado as he can muster, because the last thing he needs to think about right now is how Adam had been inside his head.

It must work, because Adam grins. It’s concentrated in one corner of his mouth for a second until it spreads to the other, and it makes him look young and bright and mischievous, and that’s worth something.  

 

* * *

 

“Okay,” Adam says later, sitting backwards at his desk chair with his arms crossed across the back. Ronan is sprawled on his bed because Adam’s only got one chair, and Adam gives him a look when he’d sat himself down and Ronan had attempted to ignore it because it’s not like he’s going to fall asleep on the fucking floorboards. Adam had kept watching him, appraising, as Ronan had closed his eyes. And now he’s frowning in Ronan’s direction, his hair washed and pushed out of his face, his elbows resting on the back of his chair. He has freckles on his forearms. He has freckles on his face too, and the back of his neck, and his knees. “I mean it’s amazing,” Adam says, still frowning, still staring. “But that doesn’t tell me how you do it.”

“I just do it,” Ronan says, annoyed. The dreaming is a lot more than a really cool parlor trick to be explained later, but he’d chosen to bring something back that was small and easy and unlikely to attract any of the things that lurk and wait. “I just can. I’m not the fucking magician here, man, it’s not a coin toss.”

“But you created something out of nothing,” Adam insists, leaning forward. There’s a crease in between his brows that divides his face, and it makes him look older, scholarly. Here is Adam at his most Adam-y, confronted with a problem, divining the shape of it. How do these connect? Where does it start? Where does it end? Ronan thinks briefly about what the dreams would be like if it was Adam doing it, instead of him. Adam who makes connections, who teases out patterns, who defines rules. Not Ronan, who leaps over them. Ronan, who sometimes misses. “I saw you pull it out of thin air. Don’t ‘it’s magic, Parrish,’ me,” he says before Ronan even opens his mouth. “You’re literally—you’re defying laws of entropy.”

“Does that mean I don’t have to take physics this year?”

Adam rolls his eyes, slumps back in his chair again. It’s late, hot outside and hotter in the apartment, which to Ronan always feels like a cloister. Minimal furniture, the smell of dust and beeswax and the hundreds of voices that have been in the church and will be there in the future, coming and going and leaving their prayers behind. He’s vaguely aware that it makes Gansey a little uncomfortable, definitely sure that Blue hates it. Noah, oddly, seems unbothered, but maybe religion has less meaning to the undead or something. Adam doesn’t seem at home here exactly, but he also doesn’t seem upset that Ronan’s here taking up his space and his time. Time’s as precious a commodity as anything to Adam Parrish, and they didn't use to get along. 

“Guess I should just accept that the rules as we know them don’t really apply anymore,” he says. “Why even bother measuring order and disorder when you can pull energy out of a ley line and matter from your head? Maybe you’re right. Maybe it doesn’t matter. You cut right through it all.”

“You’re boring me back to sleep with your nerd shit,” Ronan says, and he throws the balled-up mismatched socks he’d yanked from the dream in Adam’s direction.

 

* * *

 

Everything in the universe eventually moves from order to disorder, and entropy is the measurement of that change. According to Wikipedia, anyway, which Ronan reads through as soon as Adam falls asleep. He’d offered to let Ronan stay, something in between generosity and self-deprecation, and Ronan had almost begged off and gone home before he remembered the wasp.

 

 Order to disorder. Ronan’s not so sure, and it bothers him that he’s thinking about things at all. He lives in an in-between space, things happen or they don’t, or he can make them happen. Order from disorder. The forest for the trees. Open systems and closed systems, and then there’s Ronan.

There had been his father. Order to disorder. He’d done what he’d done and Ronan is realizing, always, the impacts of that. How he shaped his whole world. How he’d shaped theirs. Ronan wants nothing more than to live like that. Ronan doesn’t know if he can.

 

Somewhere in there, stretched out on the floor of Adam’s tiny, sweltering apartment, half watching the rise and fall of Adam’s chest on his bed to his left, Ronan falls asleep.

 

* * *

 

He dreams about counting Adam’s freckles. He dreams about his father’s ruined face. He dreams about Blue handing him a card with Gansey’s features on it. Gansey looks a thousand years old. Gansey looks seventeen. A wasp crawls the length of his arm. And they all blur together, wasps and the smudgy bruise underneath Noah’s skin and explosions in the night sky and his father’s laugh late at night.

Gansey wears a crown of thorns, and Blue has blood in her eyes, and they stare at him, like every stained-glass painting inside St. Agnes's in the winter when the light is long and strange and they seem like they're alive. 

“Ronan,” Gansey says. _“O_ _ra pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae.”_

“I’m pretty fucking sure you didn’t go to Sunday school,” Ronan says.

He hears it in Gansey's voice, and then his father's voice, _Our father who art in heaven_ , or buried out at the farm. The words echo like they do in church but he isn't in church, he's in Cabeswater. Water cascades from the leaves of trees, like stained glass, like it's own kind of cathedral. He sees the woods, and the dreaming tree, and the Devil who looks like Adam’s father—the Devil looks like Joseph Kavinsky—the Devil looks like the Devil. 

Even in his dream, Ronan wonders how that got so literal. 

“ _Amen,”_ Adam says.

He kisses Adam’s knuckles, veins and ridges of bone under skin that shift as he moves his fingers. And his fingers, long and clever with tidy, blunt nails. And the palm of his hand, the rough calluses and the lines in them. Ronan’s good with his hands, he’s always been told, but good at tearing things down. Knuckles to jawbone.

In his dream, Ronan puts his mouth to the underside of Adam’s wrist, so he can feel his pulse, and he raises his eyes through his lashes. In his dreams, Ronan looks at Adam and Adam looks back.

 

* * *

 

“Am I to understand that Jane is influencing your fashion choices now?” Gansey says this the next afternoon, which is just as hot as the day before but has the added advantage of being a Friday, which means Adam is off work early, which means the four of them are eating gelato at their favorite table in the corner. “Or did you get dressed in the dark?”

“Excuse you,” Blue elbows him in the stomach and Gansey laughs, rubs at his ribs.

“There’s this old proverb I heard once,” Adam says contemplatively, his feet, striped mismatched socks sticking out of his beat-up sneakers, crossed out in front of him in the aisle, “that says that he in salmon-colored polo shirts should not cast the first stone.”

“Man’s got a point,” Blue says. “Matching socks go hand and hand with golf and canapés.”

Adam digs into his vanilla ice cream with a satisfied look on his face, and meets Ronan’s eye over his spoon, and he grins.

The world hurtles into deep cosmic strangeness, the thrill and the horror of melting ice cream on somebody’s spoon and Gansey’s bright, boyish laugh. In his dreams, Gansey pulls a sword out of a stone, wears a crown, has ravens for eyes, drops dead at his feet. In his dreams, they’re all something else, the five of them. Something more than they are. The loose hair at the nape of Blue’s neck. Adam’s ankles crossed in the aisle.

Ronan wants to hit something. Ronan doesn’t know what any of it means.

 

* * *

 

 

“Do you think--” Gansey says later that evening, bending over the model of Henrietta with his glasses and a t-shirt on.

“Definitely not,” Ronan says, hoping to waylay this before it evolves into a history lesson or a lecture. Gansey’s been in research city, Professor Gansey mode, which is better than his future-Senator’s-son voice but a lot worse than just Gansey himself. It had started to rain that afternoon, the humidity finally reaching a breaking out, and consequently Ronan’s sprawled across the floor watching Gansey frown over model buildings. Somewhere up on the second floor he can hear Blue and Noah and Adam, Blue’s biting laughter. Her laughter’s had more bite in it since they’d found her mother’s note

“If you’re able to get up high enough,” Gansey continues, undeterred, “you can see how geography follows the ley line, the land itself. The helicopter wouldn’t take us high enough, not to see the whole thing. If you walk right on it you can see the clouds moving along it too, sometimes.”

Ronan senses a hike in his future, and sighs.

“But I wonder if people notice that too, subconsciously. Are there highways that follow ley lines? I feel like there must be. What do you think that would do?”

“Maybe that’s why your car’s such a piece of shit,” Ronan suggests.

“People following the ley line over and over for years,” Gansey’s voice sounds contemplative now. “Maybe not even knowing it. All their dreams and their fears, I wonder—it could be like a prayer wheel, maybe. I wonder what it could do. Or what it could call up.”

 “Jesus,” Ronan says. “Do you really want that image crawling out of my head and around the house tonight?”

“Oh,” Gansey says, and winces, and then laughs. “Well, it’s not like unspeakable horror hasn’t taken over your bedroom before. And by that I mean your laundry. Who am I to deny you the pleasure of killing it with a fire ax? Speaking of, where’d you go last night? The farm?”

“Parrish’s,” Ronan says, and doesn’t elaborate, because he can feel Gansey wanting to hover and trying to stop himself.

“How’s he doing?” Gansey asks, feigning nonchalance, and this is a loaded question in a whole different way because it’s not Ronan’s whereabouts that are the object of scrutiny, it’s Adam.

“Ask him yourself,” Ronan says.

“I don’t want to fight with him,” Gansey says, and then suddenly turns around and makes himself busy with the model city again.  Blue and Adam have come down the stairs, Noah suddenly absent.

Ronan feels like they’re all skating around the edges of seven different conversations, and that feeling is suddenly overwhelming. It’s Gansey and Adam, and Gansey and Ronan, and Ronan and Kavinsky and what happened at the Fourth of July, and then there’s Gansey and Blue, and Adam, and also Adam himself. All of them all tangled up together, and Gansey’s unending desire to make things right. Ronan thinks about honeycomb, and wasps. These are things that can’t just be made right. These are things that will never go back to how they were before.

“I’m gonna go for a drive,” he decides, and hauls himself up off the floor.

“I should go too,” Adam says. “I have to work tomorrow.” Adam is in a perpetual state of having to go, of having to work tomorrow. “And the rain’s not getting any better.”

“Where’s your shitbox?”

“Gansey picked me up,” Adam sighs and peers through the window. The rain looks solid and silver in the dark. “Fuck.”

“Quit bitching and get in the car,” Ronan says, and Adam turns to stare at him. “Said I’ll drive you,” Ronan throws open the front door. “C’mon.” He strides out into the rain, not waiting to see if Adam follows him or not. But Adam does.

“He was getting all Dad-y,” Ronan says, more viciously than he actually means it, as he flicks on the windshield wipers. Henrietta after dark is quiet except for the rain. The streetlights are hazy and far away. He drops his voice into an exaggerated cartoon version of Gansey’s accent, sticks his chin in the air and crinkles his nose, “Where are you going, Ronan? What time will you be back, Ronan? With whom are you associating with, Ronan? If you don’t tell me your GPS coordinates every ten minutes I have a conniption, see me rend my J. Crew in despair!”Adam laughs, and Ronan had been worried he wouldn’t. “He’s all up in your business too, you know,” he finishes, then wishes he hadn’t because it feels like tattling. _I don’t want to fight with him,_ Gansey’s voice says in his head.

“I’m flattered,” Adam says dryly. He’s idly drumming his fingers on the dashboard as Ronan drives, and his face is caught in shadow and light. It distorts his features, drawing out the shadows under his eyes and the line of his nose. He looks both more and less like himself, but he’s always looked that way sometimes—caught in the corner of an eye, Adam will look distant and distracting, a collection of features unsure how they ought to fit together but doing so anyway.

They’d all wondered, after, how Adam had changed. Ronan had sometimes felt that all that happened is everything that makes Adam Adam was thrown more sharply into focus, definition and clarity, a dream that is no longer blurry around the edges. And other times— now—

He’s staring, so he looks away.

“Yeah,” he says instead, “you’re up there right after his big crush on a thousand-year-old dead guy. Kinky.”

“He doesn’t understand why I did it,” Adam says, and Ronan looks back over at him because he hadn’t expected that. Ronan thinks Gansey might understand more than Adam gives him credit for. “And it bugs him.”

“Control freak,” Ronan says. "Him, not you. You're just a freak." 

"Thanks, Lynch. Really. Your bedside manner's as full of charm as the rest of you." 

"Fuck off. You're not dying." 

"That's up for debate. I haven't looked in a mirror recently." 

Adam is not dying. Adam is very much alive-- living, breathing, getting under Ronan's skin. And dying itself feels a little less than final lately anyway. Except when it really matters. 

“You did it because you wanted to," Ronan says. 

“Maybe,” Adam says, and doesn’t say anything else. He chews at the edge of his thumbnail, stares out the window, and Ronan makes himself look away again and back towards the road.

“Gansey thinks that if someone built a road along a ley line, so people drove down the line every day,” Ronan says, “that it would open a portal to Hell or something.”

"So Henrietta's on a Hellmouth," Adam says, and laughs. Ronan doesn't get the reference. "Or it's going to kick the heat death of the universe into warp speed." 

"The shit you say," Ronan says. "It doesn't mean anything. You know that right?" 

"I already told you," Adam says. "Entropy. But that's assuming the universe is finite, and I'm not so sure about that anymore. If the universe expands forever in every direction and the space between stars gets wider until they don't have any gas to keep them going--" 

"I already told you," Ronan says, mocking. "It doesn't need gas, or an engine."

"Can you dream up dark energy? Or a new sun? That would put an end to traffic jams,” Adam says. “And roads. And ley lines. And life as we know it.”

Somehow, this feels a lot more literal than it ought to and they both pause, and shiver. Ronan thinks about Noah’s bones, and night horrors, and Adam standing at the edge of a lake that wasn’t real because it was inside of Ronan’s head.

“Could it—“ Ronan half-says. "I mean you or I would have to--" 

“I don’t know what it can and can’t do. I don’t know what you can and can’t do.”

“ _Cthulhu fhtagn_ ,” Ronan says, and grins. "Hellbeast eats high school, no more high school." 

“A thousand options available to you and you had to go Lovecraft,” Adam sighs. It’s a companionable kind of sigh, not an irritated one. The kind of sound Ronan wants to make him make forever. A fragment of a sound, an exhalation because he’s said something ridiculous, or silly, or kind of crass. The fact that Ronan can do something and Adam can react to it is fascinating in its obviousness. 

Ronan doesn’t know what it means. Ronan is having a hard time seeing the big picture. Ronan is tired of seeing things in threes, of picking apart patterns, of looking for lines from the ground when you can only see them from the sky.

It takes courage to hold onto fragments. It takes courage to speak in sentences. Ronan’s been a lot of things and he doesn’t know if he’d describe himself as brave.

 

* * *

 

“The last thing I want to do is get Dad-y,” Adam says as he opens the car door, “but Gansey will literally haunt my ass forever if I don’t say something about tire traction and hydroplaning.”

Ronan makes a big deal of curling his lip in disgust. Hydroplaning happens to lesser men, and lesser cars. Even in this weather. The rain feels less like a sheet now and more like a wall, a physical crush of late-summer monsoon weather sliding down the windshield and onto Adam’s shoulders as he stands up. The parking lot of St. Agnes's is illuminated in streetlamp light, orange and wavering and doing little to dispel how dark it is outside, how heavy the air feels. He doesn't want to go back to Monmouth, and he doesn't really want to drive to the Barns in the downpour, but the alternative is following Adam inside and up the stairs to his room above the church. 

Parrish and Lynch—two sets of shoulders for Gansey to knock against, two bodies fighting for the spot in his passenger seat.

Adam and Ronan— that’s another combination. Ronan doesn’t know what it means.

"Can't say I didn't give it a shot," Adam says, clearly taking his silence and his bite-me expression as dismissal. He shivers. "This place is always creepy as fuck when the weather's bad and nobody else is around." 

"What, you scared of the dark?"

"The holy spirit, maybe," Adam's mouth twists in humor, a funny movement of muscles, and he steps out of the car the rest of the way, hunching his shoulders in as he jogs towards the church doorway. Ronan watches him pause at the side door to the church, the one that leads to the tiny kitchen and then the stairs, and then open it, switching the light on. He stops, switches on the light, shoulders and hair framed a series of lines in a silhouette against the lit staircase, washed out and stretched and shifted by the rain.

The light from St. Agnes's has a peculiar quality, yellow-gold and warm and soft in a way that doesn't line up with the aging light fixtures that line the staircase. Adam's figure is caught in it, captured by it for a moment. It's familiar and yet it's unfamiliar, his hands shaking water out of his hair, the slope of his shoulders and movement of his fingers. Ronan is reminded, suddenly and unexpectedly, of this kid's picture book that Matthew had insisted on reading over and over when he'd been four or five. It had been about King Arthur, of all things, and Matthew definitely hadn't understood the story but he'd like the pictures and their father had read every word out loud anyway. It had these funny old illustrations in it, heavy woodcut scenes of men on horseback and women with swords. And one illustration comes to mind, from the book's back cover. The wizard, an old man with a long beard, his shoulders turned away from the audience and his face set somewhere in between misery and mischief, heavy and hearty. Something about the look in his printed eyes sticks in Ronan's memory-- layers of age and youth and wisdom and duplicity. Adam looks like that.

He doesn't look like that at all, not really, because Adam is a teenage boy with strong, slender shoulders and nice hands and hair that gets unruly when the humidity creeps above fifty percent, with a tendency towards punctuality and a remarkable disregard for rules despite everything he says. Ronan immediately feels silly, even sitting by himself in his car, comparing the boy standing in the doorway of the church with some kind of big mythic legend. Adam would laugh at him. Adam would talk about quantum physics or something equally shitty and dry before he'd talk about magic. 

Or that's what Ronan thought, until this summer. There's something peculiar and strange about Adam's own brand of analytical, desperate, card-turning mysticism.

So it's a little bit like that anyway. 

Then Adam shuts the door, throwing the church parking lot into sudden, thundering darkness. Ronan is left with the noise on the radio and the shadowy outline of the cross against the storm-dark night sky. Bad country music and the holy spirit. 

 

Ronan closes his eyes.

 

“I’ve seen you looking,” Adam says.

He sits on the edge of his bed and Ronan sits in his chair and there’s something wild and wanting on his face. Like his silhouette against the light of the church, all eyes and the curve of his jaw. Ronan’s chest is aflame, his hands too big and heart moving too fast. Their knees touch. Then their hands touch.  

The air smells like rain and earth and the sun going down. Humidity crawls along Ronan’s spine and he can see condensation on the hollow of Adam’s throat. The shadows in Adam’s room are long and low and he’s close enough that Ronan can see the pulse jump in his temple.

“I’ve seen you looking,” Adam says. Ronan knows what's going to happen. 

He peels back his face with his fingers before Ronan can stop him.

Underneath his face is a thousand blinking eyes, the way Ronan always dreamed angels should look in the real Old Testament stories, the fire and brimstone ones. Underneath his face is his father's face, the same high elegant lines blunted with anger. Underneath his face is nothing more that what's underneath everybody's face-- red muscle and sinew and the white bone of his teeth. The tendons of his eyes. He smells like rain and earth and things buried underneath the earth for a long time and forgotten. 

"Stop it," Adam says. He grins, the muscles of his face stretching. Ronan can see the ridges of bone around his eyes. Wearing his own death mask. Blood leaks from his face onto the floor, and he won't stop looking back. 

 

"It's not a line," Noah says from somewhere behind him, and Ronan almost leaps out of his skin. He does smack his head into the roof of the car, and when he half-falls into the passenger seat behind him Noah is sitting stretched out in the back, looking at him. He looks as shadowy and strange and the night does. 

"What the fuck is wrong with you?" Ronan manages. 

"Didn't want you to fall asleep out here," Noah shrugs.

"What did that mean? What's not a line?" Ronan takes a few deep breaths, getting his heart going again. There's something about the rain and the slant of the church roof that says  _horror movie._

 _"_ The road," Noah says. 

"It's a road." 

"It's a circle." 

"Man," Ronan says, "I never know what the fuck you're talking about." 

"Yeah," Noah says sadly. "And you never pay attention either." And then he's gone, off to scare the shit out of more people or deliver more cryptic messages or whatever it is ghosts do with their time when they're not bothering him. 

Ronan rubs his eyes, and he swears, and he gets out of the car and hurries across the parking lot in the rain. 

 

* * *

 

"This place is fucking creepy," Ronan says, when Adam opens the door. There's a heavy layer of shadow draped over everything and Ronan does shiver, though maybe that's just the rain soaking his t-shirt. "Suits you."

"Water's gonna boil," Adam says, and he jerks his thumb over his shoulder towards the church kitchen. Ronan's never been to this part of the building before. He either follows Adam right up the stairs, or he follows the congregation in the front doors. There is a teakettle whistling on the stove and he waits while Adam pours water into a mug, then a second one. He also takes the mug Adam hands him, even though he doesn't really want it because it's the middle of the summer and he's not an 80-year-old woman. 

"This isn't some crazy herbal witch shit, is it?" He asks, and Adam laughs as he climbs up the stairs, bare feet on wooden floorboards. The church creaks and groans around them in the rain. In the dark, it feels alive. In the dark, Ronan feels like he's wandering down some kind of line that should feel like a transgression but doesn't. He doesn't know why it doesn't. He doesn't know when he started asking  _why_ so much. 

 Order to disorder.

"Yeah," Adam says. "It's psychotropic and everything. Got really hooked on seeing shit that's not there." Adam opens his bedroom door and lets Ronan throw himself onto his bed without complaint. Ronan almost sits on his desk chair instead but Ronan remembers his dream. 

"What you do with your alone time's none of my business," Ronan says. "Even if it means a mob's gonna burn you at the stake. I'd feel sad for maybe a whole minute." 

"Mobs burn you at the stake for masturbation?" Adam's mouth crinkles into a smile, the line between his eyes relaxing a little. He sits on his desk chair, turns it around so he can prop his feet up on the corner of his mattress. 

"For witchcraft, Parrish," Ronan says darkly.

"If they're coming for me they're coming for all of us," Adam says rationally, practically. This is familiar, back-and-forth, Adam saying something sardonic or logical knowing it'll get under Ronan's skin and make him snap back. A natural habit. But this doesn't feel mean. Ronan doesn't feel like being mean, it's just his chin-first reaction to things. "Monmouth's not that defendable but I doubt they'd storm a church."

"Fuck no," Ronan says. "Chainsaw and I are cutting and running and all you fucking heathens can battle it out." 

"If they lit you on fire you could just dream rain." 

"They'd have to burn me twice." Maybe more than twice, to get through the whole list of things Puritans would hate him for. Ronan slurps his tea. It's peppermint. 

"For masturbation?" Ronan chokes on his tea. 

"I'm going to kill you if you say that word again." 

"Masturbation," Adam says, and grins, and Ronan throws a pillow at him. 

 

When Ronan was little, he'd believed his father could do anything. A wild and magical man.When he got older he'd been sure of it. Now, he knows that was exactly the problem. 

But the belief is still there-- the pure, uninhibited joy of it, the weight of creation and possibility and secrets. 

They have their own secret.

That thought sends a thrill right through him, up and down his spine, and Ronan tugs violently at the wristbands around his wrist to deflect it even though Adam is looking out the window of his tiny room at the rain. Maybe  _secret_ is the wrong word, but it's something they shared that the rest of them hadn't, one swift and brave moment, Adam standing at the edge of a lake that didn't' exist because it was inside of Ronan's head. Ronan had said his name out loud. Adam. The first man. Funny, because he's pretty sure Adam's an atheist. 

Nobody else had ever known, outside of his family. And nobody else had ever gone there with him. 

 

"Parrish," he says, and Adam turns from the window to look back at him, eyebrows already moving around in preparation for whatever dumb thing Ronan's going to say next. They stop and freeze when he speaks again. "Can you hear it? Like right now?

"What?" Adam says. 

"Tree fucker." 

Adam licks his lips, his face tentative. "Yeah," he says. 

"Wicked." 

"It's not trying to tell me anything right now," Adam says slowly, like he's trying to figure out how much he should say, how serious Ronan is about this. "So it's not-- it's just there. It's not saying anything but it's there." He picks up his mug, shifts it around in his hands and stares at Ronan over the top of it. Like a nervous habit. The night air feels heavy and humid and filled with something important. "Why?" 

"You said Dick doesn't get it." 

"He--" Adam licks his lips again. "He believes it, and I wanted to believe it because he did but I didn't. Not really. But I think I'm starting to understand it. He doesn't understand--" Money. Adam's father. Fill in the blank. It's not like Ronan does either, but it's also not like Ronan ever tried. "He's worried."

"And you're not?"

"Maybe I should be," Adam says, and that thrills Ronan too. "You never said anything about it." 

"Neither did you. Two to tango, Parrish."

"Masturbation," Adam says and Ronan, bereft of pillows to throw his direction, just flings the bedspread. Adam throws it back and Ronan lets it fall into his lap, which immediately feels too intimate, so he drops it on the floor. Adam rolls his eyes, rises to pick it up, and Ronan feels bad. Which is annoying. Adam doesn't sit back down on his chair, though. He sits on the bed, tossing the bedspread out so it lays flat, and he leans his back against the wall. 

“I'm still trying to make it all make sense,” Adam says with some hesitancy. Ronan gets the sense he’s been thinking about this, maybe waiting for the right time to try and say it out loud. “All these things that I wanted to believe when I met Gansey-- now it's here." He taps his hand against his chest again, like he'd done in the garage the day before. "Gansey wants to believe things so badly, and you and Blue both grew up with it and for me it was never-- well. Everything’s bigger, and weirder, than I ever thought.”

“No shit,” Ronan says, and something in his chest charges like a piston.

“I guess I don’t have to tell you that.” 

“You don’t have to tell me anything, Parrish,” Ronan says. “This isn’t the fucking McCarthy hearings.”

“It feels like—“ Adam starts, and then pauses and stops. This is the kind of thing he and Gansey talk about, probably, up late at night on the phone while Ronan barricaded himself in his room and tried not to dream. But he isn’t talking about it with Gansey now. Adam’s left foot is crossed on his knee, the knobby bone of his ankle resting on the knobby bone of his kneecap, and the rain pours and pours on the windows outside. 

“Like a cosmic blowjob?” Ronan says, and Adam lets out a laugh, startled, leans his head back and knocks it against the wall. “Bigger and weirder than you thought.”

 “Cosmic mindfuck, maybe,” Adam says, rubbing the back of his skull with his hand. He looks at Ronan for a beat longer. And then he continues. “It feels like I’ve gotten a hold of an instruction manual for the whole fucking universe, and it’s asking for my help,” he says, and he doesn’t look tired or worried or burdened or strained. He looks elated, bewildered, wondrous, in the light in his eyes and the lines of his face.

And Ronan grins, because maybe that is how it feels.

Magician.

Side by side on the bed, Ronan looks at Adam, and Adam looks back. 

There’s a difference between the possible and the improbable, between the theoretical, the metaphysical and the real. Ronan drives along that line. Sometimes Ronan jumps over it. Real and unreal are just words, just categories for things, the name of a place or an arrow signaling a direction. Adam talks about time and atoms and the heat death of the universe, balance and reaction, the past and the future and how they’re all connected, how rules are rules until you figure out how to start the engine without the key in the ignition. And Ronan listens.

This is what it means, Ronan thinks, to matter.

 

**Author's Note:**

> title comes from 'interrogations' by rebecca tamas ('if there was ever anything to miss this is what you miss, how it’s beginning.')
> 
> also-- spot the siken reference. my favorite game. (my whole life is a siken reference performance art piece)
> 
> i haven't written trc fic before so please hmu here, on tumblr or on twit if you liked it!! actualremus.t.com


End file.
